Inside Microsoft Office Excel 2007
It was the spreadsheet that first made the business world take the personal computer seriously, back in the early 1980s, and since then it has become the tool of choice for businesses everywhere. If you want to work out whether a new project is financially viable, make sense of the latest sales figures, or simply create a table, then you reach for your spreadsheet application.
Excel 2007 is the forthcoming version of Microsoft’s spreadsheet application, and is an integral part of 2007 Microsoft Office system. As we shall see, it includes many new features that make it easier to create, edit, format and analyse spreadsheets, to connect to external data, and to share your spreadsheets with your colleagues – particularly when used in conjunction with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Easier to create
Excel 2007 shares with Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 the new tabbed ribbon control that gives you easy access to the tools most appropriate to the job in hand. Select a series of cells in your spreadsheet, for example, and you are given the option to Format as Table. Select this and the Table Gallery appears, offering you a wide range of designs and colour schemes. Select one and the new Design ribbon appears, offering you further options for customising the table’s appearance.
It is worth noting here that the designs and colour schemes offered by these three applications have been chosen so that you can ensure a consistent and professional look across all the documents, spreadsheets and slide decks that your organisation produces. In Excel 2007, this is helped by an improved Page Layout view that gives you a more accurate impression of what you will actually get when you go to print.
Other useful facilities include context-sensitive AutoComplete in the formula bar, and the ability to create single sheets of over a million rows and 16,000 columns. Handling such large sheets is facilitated by support for multi-core processing, and by the new default Open XML file format. Open XML is a much more compact file format, and its structure makes it much easier to recover data should the file become damaged.
Fig 1. – Conditional Formatting in Excel 2007
Easier to analyse
Once you’ve created your spreadsheet, Excel 2007 offers many new features to help you understand what you’ve got. Particularly useful here is Conditional Formatting which applies a format to each cell that depends on its value.
You can arrange, for example, to have each cell that is greater than a certain value, or in the top 10 percent, or above average, appear in a particular colour or a particular format; you can insert coloured ‘data bars’ whose length depends on cell value; you can have each cell coloured red, yellow or green depending on whether the cell value is in the low, medium or high sector; or you can choose from a variety of ‘icon sets’ to highlight values. All of these options support Live Preview which makes it much easier to select the one that most helps you identify patterns and trends in your data.
Most of the applications in the 2007 Microsoft Office system make use of a new shared charting engine that allows you to create eye-catching graphs with 3D effects, transparency, soft shadowing, glows and blurs. Again the ribbon control and the drop-down galleries make it much easier to format your chart and maintain a consistent design. It is also easier to create PivotTable views, while sorting now supports up to 64 levels, and you can sort on colour.
Fig 2. – Creating eye catching charts is even simpler and easier
Easier to connect
Spreadsheets are increasingly built on data that is stored elsewhere in the organisation, either in databases or accessible through Web services. Excel 2007 is particularly good at working with online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes, as created by Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
You can connect to external data very easily through the Data Connection Library, accessible through the Data tab on the ribbon. The screenshot below shows what can be achieved after a few clicks using a connection to MSN MoneyCentral which comes with the Beta 2 of Excel 2007. Once you’ve established the link you can select just the information you need for your spreadsheet. You can also arrange for the data to be refreshed on a regular basis, or when your spreadsheet is next opened. The Data Connection Wizard makes it very easy to connect to external databases and includes full support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services.
Fig 3. – Use the Data tab on the ribbon to quickly and easily connect to and analyse date
Easier to share
You can save your spreadsheet in Portable Document Format (PDF) or as an XML Paper Specification (XPS) file, or even as an HTML document, which allows you to share it with your colleagues in a read-only state that does not include the underlying formulae. However Excel 2007 really comes into its own as a collaborative tool when used in conjunction with SharePoint Server 2007.
As with Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007, documents created in Excel 2007 can be published to a document management server where they can take full advantage of the collaboration facilities offered by SharePoint Server 2007. However Office Excel 2007 adds the option of saving to Excel Services.
Excel Services is a server-based version of Excel 2007 which comes with SharePoint Server 2007. Excel Services can dynamically render an Excel 2007 spreadsheet into either a Web Part, which can be viewed in a Web browser, or as a Web service.
Spreadsheets rendered by Excel Services offer a high degree of fidelity to the full-blown application, which means users can sort, filter, input parameters and even work with PivotTable views from within their browser. Rendering as a Web service allows other applications to make use of the knowledge contained within your spreadsheet in a highly flexible manner.
So Excel 2007 opens up a wide range of opportunities, particularly in conjunction with SharePoint Server 2007. Why not download the Beta now and see what it can do for you!
